Healthcare institutions, such as hospitals and diagnostic clinics, utilize information systems such as Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Clinical Information Systems (CIS), Picture Archive and Communication Systems (P ACS), Library Information Systems (LIS), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), to name a few. Information stored and processed in such systems includes, for example, patient medical histories, imaging data, test results, diagnosis information, management information, and scheduling information. The information is stored centrally or divided at a plurality of locations of a computer network—typically comprising a client-server architecture. Healthcare practitioners access the patient information or other information at various time instants and locations using sophisticated software application programs to gather, analyze, manipulate, and store data.
For example, using a PACS workstation a radiologist performs an image reading for a diagnosis based on content of diagnostic images and reports the results electronically in a patient application file. Because of the large volume of data and intensive computing requirements, the software used to perform this task typically requires dedicated workstation hardware and high bandwidth network access to the diagnostic images. As a consequence, there is limited or no access to the diagnostic information and analysis capability off-site from the P ACS workstation. This limits the ability of radiologists, technicians, and other specialists who are not on-site to be able to gain access to the necessary software and data to provide timely diagnosis, for example, in an urgent situation.
Presently, this problem is typically overcome by providing remote network access to the screen or console of the workstation hardware, or by downloading sensitive data such as, for example, diagnostic data, to a remote system. In the first case, remote access software does not have any special knowledge of the application programs that are executed and are not able to optimize the presentation of the display of the application program to the user based on the state of the application program—resulting in inefficient use of network bandwidth and poor performance for the remote user. In the second case, the transmission of patient related information to an uncontrolled remote site is a security risk for such sensitive information, and furthermore, in the case of diagnostic imaging data, requires transmission of large amounts of information which is beyond the capacity of many networks.